Florida Agricultural Experiment Station


 The observance of naturally occurring cases indicates that
cattle will graze C. spectabilis occasionally in quantities sufficient
to cause ultimate death.
 Cattle eat the leaves and tender stems when in blossom.
Many more deaths have occurred from plants grazed during
the fall and winter. On this account C. spectabilis should not be
allowed to grow on areas over which livestock will graze later in
the same season.
 In the palatability trials 37 head of cattle ate 2,206 pounds of
C. spectabilis silage during a 16-day period, or nearly 60 pounds of
silage per head. This was equivalent to 12.5 pounds of dry mat-
ter, or three-fourths of a pound of dry matter per head daily.
These cattle varied in age and weight, so that undoubtedly more
was eaten by some of them. No losses by death, or even sickness,
occurred although the feces were a dark color, corresponding per-
haps to the dark color of the C. spectabilis silage. Feces were not
examined closely at that time for detection of intestinal hem-
orrhage. Apparently the toxic principle (an alkaloid) is at least
partly destroyed during the ensiling process. This possibility has
not been verified.
 Toxicity of C. spectabilis for Swine.-Emmel, Sanders and
Henley (13) observed C. spectabilis poisoning in nine hogs in one
herd which had access to a field containing a volunteer stand
of this plant. Many whole seeds passed undigested through the
alimentary tract. Comparable lesions were induced by feeding
the ground seeds of C. spectabilis experimentally. The outstanding
gross lesions were severe anemia, accumulations of fluid in the
abdominal and thoracic cavities, ecchymoses of the endocardium,
and gastritis. Deaths resulted from gastric hemorrhage.
 Later these investigators (14) gave hogs access to a field of
peanuts and C. spectabilis, after frost had killed the plants. The
ground contained an abundance of C. spectabilis seeds. All animals
except one made satisfactory gains, and no deaths occurred. Some
lesions were present, however, on autopsy of the hogs. They
concluded that swine more commonly were poisoned by eating
the green plant in the late summer months when other forage
was sparse than by eating the seeds of C. spectabilis.
 Toxicity of C. spectabilis for Chickens and Game Birds.-
Thomas (29) encountered cases of poisoning in chickens under
confinement which died after having access to litter containing
C. spectabilis seeds. This investigator force-fed whole seeds to